In the past, Information Technology (IT) depended on target environments that were homogenous, reliable, secure, and centrally owned and managed. As the nature of business evolves; marketing must be concerned with forming transient joint ventures to deliver “virtual products,” testing new products for marketplace viability, productizing as fast as possible for as little as possible, and delivering this amalgamation in what appears to be a “seamless” environment that always “knows the user.” At the same time, business must be concerned with maximizing use of IT resources to reduce total cost of ownership.
To meet these market requirements and business constraints, IT must now be concerned with collaboration, data sharing and resource sharing across virtual organizations and environments; and the seamless delivery of product and service across virtual organizations and environments. Operations must be concerned with the management of increasingly complex computing environments. Outsourcing models began this transformation; economics and market pressures are pushing the transformation even further to the Utility Computing model. An additional force is also driving the need for automaton-level integration, the sheer numbers and speed at which heterogeneous pervasive computing devices are being introduced at the network edge.
These evolutionary pressures are generating new requirements for distributed application creation, execution and management environments. The utility computing model (resources on demand-soft and hard) mandates the synergistic operationalization of these trends. From an operationalization perspective, utility computing requires traditional off-line autonomous environments (creation, execution and management) to interact in near real time shifting from statically provisioned autonomous silos to systems that are dynamically provisioned across shared heterogeneous resources in response to real-time business needs.
Today, the Internet is still designed primarily for human interpretation and use. Business-to-Business (B2B) and e-commerce experienced limited success with automaton-level integration. Success was hard won through APIs and programmatic incorporation of human-obtained information. Web Services begins to address automaton-level integration. Both lack Internet standards, infrastructure and tooling to support automaton-interrogateable service profiles with location independence.
Accordingly, to strategically align with business objectives, an architecture is required that focuses on interoperability, virtualization and near-real time active management technologies to operationalize the eServices Utility.